No coincidence: good local newspapers = good place to live

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There’s a basic human longing for a sense of place, some part of the world that’s home, a place where you are a part of something that feeds your soul. Find it, feel it, and you’re one of the lucky ones.

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The importance of that sense of belonging that I feel for this place struck me while attending the North Carolina Press Association’s awards ceremony last week in Raleigh. I looked around the room at an event I’ve been attending on and off for a few decades, and the room has changed. Most of the publishers whose families had owned their newspapers for a generation or two are gone. The number of privately held media companies has shrunk to just a handful. Even many smaller community papers are now owned by the big chains.

Those corporations don’t always have the best interests of their communities at the forefront of their decision making, despite the best efforts of journalists still working in hollowed out newsrooms. The passion to produce quality journalism that’s meaningful to the place you call home gets sucked out of an organization when its primary mission is to attract clicks that are almost always put behind a paywall (just ask Bob Gremillion, publisher of the Asheville Watchdog, a fantastic online news source over in Buncombe County).

Full story HERE